


Godspeed, Sweet Dreams

by MickyRC



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ace Friendly Relationship, Cuddling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, I've been reminded why I avoid the present tense, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Most of the narration should be read in the Voice of God, Nightmares, One Shot, Or At Least I Tried, Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Stream of Consciousness, author uses italics too much, just a little bit fluffy?, post-apocalypse-that-wasn't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 00:51:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20769794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MickyRC/pseuds/MickyRC
Summary: If you were to ask a religious scholar whether a demon has nightmares, they would certainly say yes, of course, and their answer would certainly be wrong.  The simple proof is that the demon Crowley would not be nearly as fond sleeping if that were so.Unfortunately, there is considerably less research material to consider when it comes to angels.Aziraphale has a nightmare about Falling, and Crowley has to figure out how he can help.





	Godspeed, Sweet Dreams

Aziraphale doesn’t much like sleeping. He imagines it must be like how most Beings don’t much like eating; it’s fine on occasion, maybe even nice once in a while, but generally not worth the fuss. It just takes up so much _time_, time he could be using to read, or work miracles, or find a new café that makes truly _wonderful_ scones. Really, sleeping just isn’t his cup of tea.

He has to admit, however, that there is something simply… _lovely_ about sleeping next to Crowley. When it started, it was much more a matter of being close to each other than resting. It might have surprised some that a demon could be quite so cuddly, but not Aziraphale. That’s just how Crowley is; some snake-like instinct to hold something close and squeeze carries through to his human form. So when this had first begun, they’d start out cuddling, and once the demon fell asleep, the angel would turn on a low lamp and pick up a book. Crowley doesn’t mind—despite occasional (and much dramatized) grumbles about the light, he quite likes that if he wakes up in the night he can just curl closer and have Aziraphale reach down absentmindedly to rub his back or card fingers through his hair. So even though the angel rarely lays back on the pillows and closes his eyes, it feels like time well spent for both of them.

There are, of course, occasional exceptions. Sometimes after a particularly tiring day of casting miracles (because he does, of course, still cast miracles, even if there’s no one checking up on it anymore), Crowley will wake up and find Aziraphale slumped down, book open across his chest and mouth gently open, an angelic image of exhaustion. When that happens, the demon will carefully remove the book back to the bedside table and reach across to turn off the lamp. (He will never admit it to anyone, but sometimes he just sits and gazes fondly for a minute before he turns the light off. And he will never admit it to himself, but sometimes it’s longer than a minute, and sometimes the gaze goes well beyond “fond” to somewhere on the border of “smitten.”) Crowley never brings it up the next morning, and Aziraphale never questions why he wakes up mid-morning tucked close against the demon instead of seeing the sun rise over his latest classic.

***

Crowley is, by now, used to waking up to find the light on. He isn’t even surprised when he pushes back against Aziraphale and gets no reaction; it’s been a busy week in the bookshop, and there had been a particularly distraught little girl in the park that afternoon, so he had half expected that the angel had tired himself out.

Scrunching his eyes against the light, the demon sits up just enough to roll over and turn off the light, and that’s when he gets his first surprise. Although the light’s still on, it seems Aziraphale hadn’t fallen asleep reading as usual, but had consciously decided to put the book away and lie down fully. Something trapped in his ribcage tries to escape, because Heaven take him, the angel is _cute_ when he’s asleep. It’s something about his hair, the way the pale curls fluff out and settle around his head on the pillow. Like a reproduction of a halo, only gentler. Crowley (with an expression on his face he will never, ever admit is positively lovesick) reaches down to carefully brush the hair out of his angel’s face, and that’s when he gets his second surprise.

Despite the fact that Aziraphale doesn’t much like sleeping, you would never guess if you saw it. In sleep the angel’s natural boyishness is only amplified, leaving his face a loose, relaxed image of innocence. Not tonight, though.

Tonight the angel wears a slight frown, and the skin outside his eyes is tense with discomfort.

***

There is a misconception among nearly all religious scholars that there is no possible way for a demon to overlook, even for an instant, that they are Fallen. This is simply untrue, as they all would have passed into madness a very long time ago if that were the case. It is accurate to say that a demon will never _forget_ that they are Fallen. But much the same way you can temporarily abate a headache or a sore throat with a sufficient distraction, a demon can temporarily abate the pain of their loss of Grace. Keep in mind, though, that this kind of pain is a great deal worse than the worst headache or sore throat, and the effectiveness of the cure is rather proportional.

But it is true that demons have found various ways to distract them from their own suffering. The most popular is, of course, to cause _others_ suffering. This is, in fact, why they started their tempting and cruelty in the first place.

Crowley, though, wasn’t much for causing others suffering. Annoyance and inconvenience, sure. Sometimes even a bit of misfortune. But the level of suffering required to calm the metaphorical headache (really it’s a bit more like drowning, being boiled alive, and having a nasty case of the flu all at once) is farther than this particular demon is usually willing to go. However, if you’ve ever had a headache, a sore throat, or the flu (less so the other things), you probably know that sometimes the best way to forget the pain is simply to go to sleep for a while. Crowley discovered this sometime around the second century BC, and has made great use of it ever since. So if you were to ask one of those religious scholars whether a demon has nightmares, they would certainly say yes, of course, and their answer would certainly be wrong. The simple proof is that the demon Crowley would not be nearly as fond sleeping if that were so.

Unfortunately, there is considerably less research material to consider when it comes to angels.

***

Unsure of what to do, Crowley brushes another lock of hair away from the angel’s face. “’Ziraphale?” he asks quietly, voice still matted with sleep.

But nothing changes on Aziraphale’s face.

Crowley sits for a minute looking at the angel (this time closer to concerned than fond _or_ smitten), trying to figure out what to do. Should he turn the light out and let him sleep, or would it be better to just wake him up and find out what’s wrong?

He is just reaching over to the lamp, determined to lie back down but stay awake to keep an eye on his angel, when said angel makes a sound. It is something short of a whine, but whatever Crowley might call it, he is certain it is not a happy sound. Looking back to his face, the demon’s suspicions are confirmed; Aziraphale’s face has only tightened, his frown only grown deeper.

His mind instantly changed, Crowley puts a hand on the angel’s shoulder and speaks louder. “Aziraphale. Wake up, angel.”

“No,” Aziraphale mutters unhappily, but Crowley knows he isn’t speaking to him. Suddenly, though, he does know what’s going on. His angel is having a nightmare.

As previously stated, demons do not have nightmares. And since Aziraphale is the only person Crowley has ever slept next to (discounting that one time on the Ark; _hell_ those kids had been clingy), he is rather hopelessly out of his depth here. As much as he hates it, all he has to go on is instinct, and his instincts are screaming at him to wake his angel up and get him out of whatever dream is hurting him. But that’s proving harder than he could have imagined.

“’Ziraphale, angel, come on, wake up.”

Aziraphale’s face looks tense enough to shatter. “No, _please_….”

“It’s just a dream, angel.” Crowley is shaking his shoulder now, to no effect.

“I _didn’t_—no….” the angel pleads to whoever he sees in his sleep.

Crowley is coming up fast on the border of panic as he calls for Aziraphale to just wake up, please, darling, it’s just a dream, just _wake up_.

But Aziraphale isn’t listening, at least not to the demon desperately trying to help him. “No,” he says one more time, and then even Crowley, who is so unfamiliar with nightmares, can tell that the dream shifts, because Aziraphale _wails_, a sound he absolutely never wants to hear again in his long, long life and which he wants to stop _so badly_, but now he’s not just trying to shake the angel awake but trying to keep him from hurting himself as he thrashes on the bed, eyes still held tight and tense. Crowley hasn’t realized it yet, but he is crying, tears flying off his face as he does his absolute best to gather the flailing angel into his arms and just _hold_ him, for whatever good that might do.

And then Aziraphale sits up with a gasp of “_Please!_”, and with no warning at all his wings manifest and Crowley is knocked off the bed with the sudden force. It takes the demon half a moment longer than it should to shake off the daze. And then, despite his instincts screaming, _screaming_, for him to dive back onto the bed to his angel, he forces himself to move slowly, gently, oh so carefully, because the wailing has stopped (he would suffer every sin over thrice fold in thanks for that), and as much as he doesn’t want Aziraphale out of his sight for another _instant_, he couldn’t bear to startle him and make it worse.

So the demon moves slowly to get up off the floor and kneel at the side of the bed. (And while he ignores that irony, the universe certainly doesn’t.)

Aziraphale is sitting up on the bed, hunched forward over his legs and clinging to the bedclothes like they are the last foothold on the side of a boundless cliff. His wings are spread behind him; open to their fullest, the farthest feathers brush the walls of the bedroom. He is breathing hard, unsteady and uneven, sucking in air the way no creature that doesn’t physically need air ever should. Crowley can’t see his eyes from his place on the floor, and a part of him (possibly the thing trapped in his ribcage) doesn’t _want_ to see, because the rest of it is awful enough. But he does not hesitate as he starts to (slowly, _so slowly_) reach out. “Aziraphale?”

The angel doesn’t move, except with the force of his breathing, and Crowley tries again, hand stretching out towards the patch of comforter the angel is staring at. “Angel?” His hand reaches the spot, and he feels more than sees Aziraphale’s eyes find some focus on his hand. Deciding to plow ahead, Crowley climbs delicately onto the bed and ducks his head down to meet the angel’s eyes with his own.

For an instant, it is as bad as that thing in his chest thought it would be. The blue, the beautiful shining blue of Aziraphale’s eyes is almost entirely gone, covered over by his blown pupils and overshadowed by the red creeping into their surrounding whites. It is awful, and terrifying, and Crowley hates it with every ounce of being—for that one instant. For upon meeting the demon’s eyes, the angel finds focus and the sheet of horror cracks.

As terror breaks away, confusion and fear (similar, but so very different, as Crowley knows to his core) come through instead. And against confusion, the demon can finally help.

“It was a dream, angel,” he assures Aziraphale. “It was just a bad dream.”

There is half a moment of continued confusion before it all shatters and breaks apart and Aziraphale collapses into tears. “_Crowley_,” is all he gets out before his breathing is overtaken by sobs, but it is far more than he even needed to. Because Crowley is there, now able to gather the angel into his arms and just hold him (and he would suffer the sins of every demon to have ever Fallen thrice fold in thanks for that), rocking and hushing and speaking comforting words as Aziraphale clings to him and cries into his shoulder.

It is a long while later, but still a long way from dawn, when the sobs begin to quiet into hitching breaths and the desperate grip on Crawley’s back begins to loosen.

“You’re alright,” the demon continues to coo, “you’re okay. Just a dream.”

After a time, Aziraphale folds away his wings and pulls back a little bit, although he stays well within easy reach of Crowley. His shoulders have stopped shaking for the most part, and his breathing no longer shudders, but his face is red and his cheeks are wet and even though there is no more terror or even fear in his eyes, there is the shadow of it. There will be for a while. Crowley doesn’t need to have had a nightmare to know it.

“I’m… I’m okay,” the angel gets out, his voice raspy and a little hoarse.

Crowley nods, understanding that the belief in that statement is more important than the truth of it. “You want to tell me about it?” he asks, because those instincts are kicking back in and telling him that pure comfort is not enough right now.

Aziraphale’s next breath is shaky again, but it smooths as it goes. He crowds in a little closer to Crowley. “I…” he starts, but is overtaken by a final rattle and has to start again. “I—I Fell,” he gets out. “I was cast out. I was, it was—” Suddenly Aziraphale freezes, and Crowley aware that he had frozen a moment before the angel. “Oh. Oh _my dear_,” Aziraphale continues, suddenly no longer shaken and almost guilty instead. “I’m so sorry, that’s not what—Crowley, that wasn’t fair, I’m—”

But Crowley had stopped hearing when he froze, and is only catching up. “Oh, _angel_.” He pulls Aziraphale as close as he can, unwilling to let a millimeter of space between him and his love. “Angel, that must’ve been—” he can’t finish. There is no word to finish with.

It takes Aziraphale a moment to reevaluate the situation, but as soon as he is close to getting it, he reaches his arms back around Crowley and holds on as tightly as the other is holding to him.

Nobody turns out the light that night. And once they’ve left the bedroom an hour or so later to go get cocoa and sit curled up on a couch, nobody lays on the bed for a few days. And once those few days have passed it is a while longer before Crowley starts to sleep again, and longer still before Aziraphale joins him.

Aziraphale still doesn’t much like sleeping. It just isn’t his cup of tea. But he loves sleep all the same, because it offers a reprieve for his demon, because it gives him amnesty, however temporary, from the pain the angel came so close to imagining, and which the demon can never forget.

And he would suffer the sins of every demon, every human, and every single angel thrice fold in thanks for that.

**Author's Note:**

> Right, so! That was actually my first ever one shot? Which shouldn't be possible but somehow is? But I liked it and I'll definitely be writing more of them. I hope you enjoyed this little bit of love. I'm also over on tumblr, there's not much up yet, but there will be very soon!
> 
> The title came from the Dixie Chicks song "Godspeed," a lovely little lullaby that shouldn't make me cry but does anyway.
> 
> Also side note I'm currently looking for beta readers if anyone's interested? I'd love to beta for others, too!


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